ReadWriteWeb

Point and click web mashup startup ifttt ("if this then that") has raised financing from cutting-edge tech incubator Betaworks. News of the funding came to us via NeuVC's bot watching the firm's portfolio page, which is fitting given the nature of the startup.

ifttt allows anyone to set up a chain of conditional actions between a wide variety of web services, like "If I post a photo to Flickr, save it to my Dropbox." The company calls these "recipes." We wrote about the service when it launched to the public in September. Microsoft's Scott Hanselman also wrote up a nice review of the service and says "this is going to be huge." ifttt isn't just a single service, though, and it isn't even just an amalgamation of multiple services strung-together; it's a great example of a whole paradigm of DIY mashups. As Blogger and WordPress were to self-publishing and YouTube was to video publishing, so ifttt could be to working with interlinked web applications for everyday people. Can this startup herald a new era of lay hackers? The UI is good, the only question is whether there's really enough demand for such a service.

TheInterviewr is a new mashup that makes it super, super simple to record telephone interviews online using your existing telephone. It is a dream come true and for now at least - it's free.

The system uses APIs from Twilio and Box.net to let users schedule interviews with contacts, enter notes for the interviews and upload associated files to a central place. Then, when it comes time to do the interview, both parties are sent an SMS to remind them it's about to begin. The person performing the interview clicks a button on TheInterviewr website and both peoples' phones are called automatically. Have a conversation, refer to your notes and documents, then click the same button to end the call. A recording will be available to listen back to immediately. It's like magic.

Mashup developer Jeffrey Winter was thinking about Wikipedia one day and specifically about a rumor that if you followed the first link on any Wikipedia entry that you'd eventually land on the page for Philosophy. So, nerd that he must surely be, he built a web interface to trace this phenomenon and visualize it. The end result is very cool.

Called "All Roads Lead to 'Philosophy'," Winter's mashup tests what he believed to be a reasonable theory and it seems to test well. The fact is that Wikipedia is more regularly structured than one might think and as one commenter on Winter's post said, most Wikipedia articles begin by saying that the subject of the page is a subset of a larger concept. As you click through those larger and larger concepts, you will eventually hit the ultimate abstraction: philosophy! It's pretty cool, give it a try.

LinkedIn showed off a new addition to its Lab site today called the LinkedIn Connection Timeline. It's a very fun way to remember people you used to work with throughout the years - and see where they are now. Built internally by LinkedIn's Gordon Koo, the visualization does a good job illustrating the tip of the iceberg of what structured, social data can provide when accessed programmatically.

And it's fun. It brings to mind the app Memolane and makes me wish someone would build something like this for Twitter or Facebook. Take the list of people I'm connected to there and show me when on a timeline I connected with the ones I have interacted with the most. Play me a song that my Last.fm profile says I used to listen to a lot, don't listen to anymore and that has a high-emotion rhythm to it and you've got a mashup that could bring lots of people near tears. (You just know that Facebook will offer something like this someday.) Always more emotionally reserved, LinkedIn at least offers a fun retrospective of past co-workers.

Location based social network Foursquare announced this afternoon that it will host its first Hack Day on February 4th in New York City. That means developers will be traveling to a still undisclosed location to work together on interesting new ways to make use of Foursquare, its Place and Check-in data.

I'm cheering for someone to build a Foursquare mashup with Google News and Wikipedia, so I can be told automatically when the places I go have been mentioned in the news or have history posted on Wikipedia. What would you like to see built? What would you like to build, yourself? Af all the competing location services online, Foursquare probably has the best combination of a useful API and lots of rich user and Place data.

Mashup tool provider JackBe is working with Microsoft to create dashboard apps using Azure DataMarket. In our coverage of the DataMarket, we noted that it's a marketplace, not an app environment. That's where JackBe comes in. JackBe can run in Azure to help end users create their own mashups using data sources from the marketplace.

The phrase "Internet of Things" got to be an overused misnomer even before the technology had a chance to become common, but at least we're on to everyday use cases: a developer has arranged for his thermostat to turn on when he's home and switch off when he leaves.

Hans Scharler's thermostat keeps dibs on his location, the outside temperature and the temperature inside the house, and decides when to kick on the air conditioning or heat.

SAP employee Timo Elliott has unveiled a prototype for an augmented reality business intelligence iPhone app. He emphasizes that it's a prototype, not a supported product. It's not available for download yet, but Elliott gives us a look at what an augmented enterprise could look like.

Elliot released some proof-of-concept mock-ups on his blog earlier this year (see our coverage), but the project is now in development at SAP in the BusinessObjects Innovation Center, which Elliot says is based on Google Labs.

In the read/write era, enterprise technology has been playing catchup with the consumer sector, integrating social networking, wikis and activities streams into business-grade applications. But that hasn't always been the case - look at the evolution of e-mail, which was originally nurtured by enterprises. And there's at least one area in which enterprises are leading the pack today: point-and-click app creation and the data mashups that feed them.

It's been 5 years since Google first introduced the Google Maps API, a move that has brought Google Maps to more than 350,000 websites worldwide, and this week the company is celebrating the API's birthday with a map of Google Maps mashups.